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Hands on with the next wave of search aggregators

New search tools are making it easier to get to the content and communities …

As we flounder under a perpetually escalating storm of information on the Internet, search is becoming more prevalent than ever. While the big three engines may rule the digital seas, niche and custom search engines are claiming their small, but respectable harbors by focusing on areas like health, science, finance, and even cooking. Aiming to leverage these specialty engines are a new generation of search aggregation tools, and Ars Technica went hands-on with two of them to see if we can spend less time in a search box, and more with the results we need.

Also known as "custom search engines," or CSEs, the simple idea behind these tools is to offer a dashboard for various search engines that focus on content and visualize results beyond the bland set of 10 URLs and descriptions that is truly getting long in the tooth. Why search with a single one-size-fits-all sledgehammer when you can aggregate results from a variety of specialized engines?

Give me options

The first CSE on our list is Hittery which, at first glance, isn't much more than a bunch of various search services collected on a single page. A default batch of search engines is presented to new visitors, separated by topics such as sports, code and scripts, celebrity gossip, health and medicine, and so on. The search boxes can be rearranged in any order or closed completely if you simply don't need that particular service, and menus at the top of the site allow you to choose from a wide variety of what Hittery distinguishes as "normal" and "custom" search engines.

The former, as you may guess, are typical engines and services like Wikipedia, whois, and Dictionary.com, as well social news and networking sites like Digg and Facebook. Typing a query into any of these search boxes displays results in a familiar list of links, but tools are provided in a sidebar to hone searches over a specific period of time, such as the last 24 hours or the last 7 days. Below that, a launchpad of sorts allows you to easily rerun your query at a handful of external sites like YouTube and Wikipedia. While most of us wouldn't have much trouble typing those other sites in and running the queries manually, there's something to be said about Hittery's clever integration of other search engines, making it easy to quickly check a query against a specific kind of content or engine.

Hittery's "custom" search engines are one of its strong points, and cover umbrella topics but only scour for results from "carefully selected websites that publish useful and trustworthy content." The human element is making a comeback in search lately, as evidenced by efforts like Mahalo. Hittery incorporates this new trend into its simple, compartmentalized dashboard by offering custom searches like "Health," which specifically searches 75 "trusted" medical sites. We found this to be useful in our testing for various medical afflictions, though we couldn't find a list anywhere at Hittery of which medical sites it's actually searching.

Hittery's search-box-on-steroids product may seem like a hollow gimmick at first, but it proves to be useful for any kind of research where a perspective broader than just Google's is useful (or necessary). At the least, it can significantly cut down on the number of bookmarks and URLs you have to keep floating around.

Do it all for me

The other CSE that we think is worth a look right now is Addictomatic, as it takes quite a different approach from Hittery's. It offers a single search box that fires off your query to multiple search engines at once. With a tag line of "inhale the web," Addictomatic will display a handful of the top results from a wide range of popular search engines, social networks, blog searches, and media outlets.

Addictomatic doesn't take Hittery's route of topical focus or human-filtered sources. Instead it offers more of a birds-eye view of your query across a customizable myriad of automated search engines and user-generated content communities. A fundamental principle of this design is that you can run, say, a vanity search for your own name or a new hobby you're picking up, then bookmark the static URL that Addictomatic creates for use as an on-call EKG of the query. Hit your bookmark, and Addictomatic does all the legwork for you across these engines, bundling up the best results from each one in a slick UI. It's the closest you'll probably get to having a secretary that never asks for a raise.

One of Addictomatic's strengths lies in media search as Flickr photos and YouTube videos. While Hittery sticks to the search result formula of listing URLs even for media, Addictomatic will return a small batch of thumbnails for photos and videos. There's no special magic like playing videos in-line on Addictomatic's site, but the ability to actually see photo and video results before clicking on the mere name of them is a big boost to search productivity.

Seeking the grail

While the importance of good search cannot be understated, the significant differences in the ways that Hittery and Addictomatic present both their tools and results underline the fact that there's a lot to explore in the realm of search usability and presentation. Some companies are seeing limited success by seriously pushing boundaries with highly visual search products and repurposing content. Hittery and Addictomatic are interesting, though, because they're starting with the basics of search and taking more natural steps to improve the experience and efficiency from both ends of the search box.